The SC09 Challenges

The SC09 Conference Challenges will provide a way to showcase both expertise and HPC resources in friendly yet spirited competitions with other participants. SC09 will feature the following Challenge areas: Bandwidth, Storage, and the Student Cluster Competition, formerly known as the Cluster Challenge SC09 Challenges will be highlighted to complement the conference theme and technical program agenda. We encourage early submissions as SC09 Challenges will be based on having a sufficient number of entries.

Specific questions on each area should be addressed to the specific Challenge or the Student Cluster Competition as outlined below.

The Bandwidth Challenge

The Bandwidth Challenge is an annual competition for leading-edge network applications developed by teams of researchers from around the globe. Past competitions have showcased multi-10gigabit-per-second demonstrations. SC09s Bandwidth Challenge will focus on real-world applications and data movement issues, and will include live demonstrations across the SCinet network infrastructure.

The Storage Challenge

The Storage Challenge is a competition showcasing applications and environments that effectively use the storage subsystem in high performance computing, which is often the limiting system component. Submissions can be based upon tried and true production systems as well as research or proof of concept projects not yet in production. Participants will describe their implementations and present measurements of performance, scalability and storage subsystem utilization. Judging will be based on these measurements as well as innovation and effectiveness; maximum size and peak performance are not the sole criteria. Finalists will be chosen on the basis of submissions that are in the form of proposals; they will present their completed results in a technical session during the conference, at which the winners will be selected.

Student Cluster Competition

The Student Cluster Competition will showcase the amazing power of clusters and the ability to utilize open source software to solve interesting and important problems. Only teams comprising students (both high-school and college) are eligible to participate. Teams will compete in real-time on the exhibit floor, where they will run a workload of real-world applications on clusters of their own design. The winning team will be chosen based on workload completed, benchmark performance, and overall knowledge of the applications. Another award will be given for the most power-efficient design.